The Baseball Bloggers Alliance is once again conducting its own end-of-season MLB awards as part of an ongoing effort to provide an improved and more transparent balloting system–this year with names! The ballots are divided evenly among chapters representing each team, along with a “General Baseball” chapter, and are tallied with equal weight to create the final winners. You can follow along in more detail at the BBA website.

The Pittsburgh chapter, which consists of RTJR and our three good friends at WHYGAVS, RumBunter, and North Side Notch, votes only for the National League side. Here are my votes for the Willie Mays Award (Rookie of the Year), which will be added to those of the other three blogs to form the Pittsburgh ballot.

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Holy cow. There are so many good candidates for the NL’s top rookie honors that choosing among them seems impossible. I spent much of the day trying to find a systematic way to decide who to include and who to leave out, and with all the different factors involved and the unusually large amount of choices, I couldn’t figure out a way.

Posey was drafted right after Pedro Alvarez, and there were a few people making a case for Buster over Pedro back in 2008. We’re seeing why. Posey came up to San Francisco and really tore it up with a .305/.357/.505 line, including 18 homers in just 108 games. He also helped lead the Giants to the playoffs, which can act as a tiebreaker of sorts in my mind when two guys seem so close.

Yeah, yeah, call me a homer. Here’s my case for justifying Walker’s two-spot: a .296/.349/.462 line to begin with, moving to a new position and performing adequately, and essentially acting as the lone leader of a barren Pirates team for much of the summer. He also came out of nowhere and exceeded absolutely everybody’s expectations, which means something (to me, anyway). Besides, I had to at least show a little love to the rookie-laden Bucs in this thing, since it’s likely to be all about Heyward and Posey everywhere else.

Heyward had a leg up on pretty much all of his competition because he played out the whole season with the club – but that happened for a reason – he’s good. Jason put together an extremely strong first year in the bigs, but we heard an awful lot about how this kid was the second coming all spring and his best asset ended up being on-base ability, not eye-popping power and productivity. He still had a spectacular year and and will certainly be an extremely valuable player for years to come, but I’m going to say that Heyward was barely outdone by a couple counterparts in his rookie year.